No Man's Sky - Worlds Pt. 1

July 21st, 2024

I am really enjoying the new Worlds patch overall, although it is slightly disappointing in the fact that it didn't really affect ALL worlds. I was kind of hoping that we'd see a refresh of all the general environments so that old environments would be a little more varied in flora and fauna, but that seems largely not the case. Most planets you visit, are the same as what they have always been, which in manyh respects is fine. To be fair, they did refresh colors of planets, but largely it's set that every now and then, you run into a planet with the new features.

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The Beekeeper

July 5th, 2024

I normally put in 8.5 hour work days, then I usually do an hour or two work to add more items to my ebay store every day, except for Fridays. This schedule is meant to give me an early day on Fridays so that I can put more work in on ebay than normal. The reason I bring this up is that this last week has kind of messed me up as my work gave us both Thursday and Friday off. Because of this, I was leaving work at an earlier time and getting done with everything that much quicker. This let me get to a point on Tuesday where I didn't really have anything going on at an earlier time so I found myself looking for something to watch... specifically on Amazon Prime as I have their month long trial because I actually needed something quickly delivered awhile ago so now I'm trying to binge anything they have worthwhile to watch (which turns out to not be much). Low and behold... The Beekeeper had a banner on the top advertising that they had it. Well I heard that this movie was actually better than the box office gave it and was very reminiscent of older 90s like Action movies, so I decided to give it a shot.

I will say up front, I'm not overly a Jason Stathom fan, I liked him in his early Guy Richie movies, but I can't say there is anything I have seen him in since that point that I actually enjoyed watching, so he kinda starts with an uphill battle from the get go. And he did not disappoint.

If I were to describe The Beekeeper in a nutshell.. I would say... It's "John Wick if he didn't like guns." That pretty much sums it up. You can tell the makers of the moview were just like "let's make another John Wick again, people don't seem to get sick of those movies, but we'll make it with a twist!" Which could have been kind of interesting. Early on the fights involved him fighting guys with guns and taking the guns apart as they disarmed them and the proceeded to kill them with other interesting methods. I will say, I don't really understand the "no guns" thing when you just end up hanging people all the time, but maybe that's just me. Usually when people don't wanna use guns, it's because they are actually against killing people, but this guy doesn't mind killing people, he just doesn't want to do it with guns. At least for awhile, he does start using guns about half way into the movie, they just are never his. I guess that makes it OK.

Honestly, that's not even particularly the biggest problem with me. The acting and writing in the movie was just atrotious. I realistically thought of stopping the movie several times over it was so bad, but eventually I was just like whatever, we'll just see where it is going. But it was really bad. And I will say, sure action movies aren't known for great acting and writing... and it was really bad FOR AN ACTION MOVIE.

I will give it one positive here, about halfway to 2/3rds into the movie, they did introduce a twist that I thought was marginally interesting, and its presence was probably the primary reason I didn't stop the movie. That twist (it was revealed so early I don't consider it much of a plot twist, just a twist in what the movie was doing), is that the guy in charge of the evil company that the beekeeper was trying to murder was the President's son. This was kind of an interesting idea that could have been much more. Not only does it add problems getting to the kid in the white house, but it also creates moral dilemmas with killing the kid, and going into it the Beekeeper was even contemplating killing the President herself. But don't worry, he never really had any real thought on the process, he was just going to kill the kid and the fact that the kid tried to kill his mother (the president), made it so that I guess he decided that was a good enough reason not to kill her. He didn't really wrestle with it, there wasn't really much more to it than that.

I was intrigued by the Beekeeper organization, but they didn't really explain it at all. The only thing that was really mentioned was there was an orginazation with other keepers, and apparently safe houses, and that if you catch the notice of a beekeeper, you will end up dead. They don't really say much more about it, the US government knows about them, and has maybe used them, but we don't exactly know what they are. Are they assassins? Mercenaries? No idea, they just protect the hive, that's all that's worth knowing about them. I get that they are trying to have some sort of intrigue, but the name of the movie is The Beekeeper, you'd think they'd explain what that is just a little bit!

Anyway, this was a bad movie, I would give it a thumbs down. Don't even bother watching it. I don't even think it's a movie in the vein of a 90s movie, like I said... it's just yet another John Wick movie, but not as good. John Wick movies are VERY modern, and nothing like 90s action movies. I wouldn't bother watching this thing at all, it's really not worth your time.